Saturday, August 15, 2009

The Election is over

Because of job it took me a few days to write down my thoughts about the election and its result. A few days that are needed to sort my thoughts.

At first I want to thank all the voters and volunteers and other participants who had took part in the election process. I want to thank those who had put their trust in me, as in the last year I would work hard to prove myself trustworthy. To be a community elected trustee is a tremendous honor for me.

The number of participants are almost at the same level as last year. This is far more lower than the license update vote. For me this indicates that the majority of our editor community is not very interested in what the board in special and the Foundation in wide sense is doing. The nice interpretation of this is that the board and the Foundation is just doing that what the community expects it doing, nothing spectacular and nothing utterly wrong. The WMF is traditionally a very quiet organization. Despite its power it doesn't make a lot of public recommendations or comments. Actually I am comfortable with this, because the Foundation and the board is not the star or the center of our community. The Foundation and the board is supporting the community. On the other side, the Foundation is also doing more than just support the community. It is making meaningful things with the knowledge that is accumulated by the community. This is expressed in our mission. An encyclopedia or a text book or a research project are only meaningful if they are indeed used. The Foundation had put it on its agenda to promote this. And the Foundation and the board are the place where it would be decided on how and where to promote. This is the reason why I hope we will have a broader participation of the community by the strategic planning.

I am sad that Domas dropped out of the board, on the other side I am also very happy that Samuel joined us now. The first time I met both of them on Wikimania 2005 in Frankfurt. I joined a presentation made by Domas and Tim about MediaWiki programming there and Samuel recorded a session about four different wikipedia language versions on which I presented the chinese Wikipedia. Both of them are very witful and resourceful. I am really happy in looking forward to work with Samual. And I know that Domas is simple not to be overlooked, in or outside of the board.